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Brethren Of The Free Spirit

by: Gypsy

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In this day and age it isn't easy being a truly Independent Artist, the hopes of the Internet making it easier have for the most part not come true. Of course getting heard and releasing material has never been made easier, the Record companies haven't got it their own way anymore. Anybody with a computer can in theory have his/her own record label these days, either to release their own material or with some effort and a bit of searching put together a small collection of Independent artists and release their material.

I use my label to release my own material and samplers of artists I collaborate with, like many artists I live hand to mouth.. It's a struggle getting projects off the ground and seeing them finished..In fact I found that it was easier to get some financial return for my art back in the cassette culture days. Digital Downloads have made it a lot harder to receive any, even the smallest amount of financial rewards for my art.

Of course getting heard is in itself a reward, but, doesn't put food on the table, so, it is more than true that the internet is a double edged sword, on the one hand, Independent can again truly mean what it says, but sadly the buying public don't seem to have caught the bug yet, and if there is no support for artists such as myself, then eventually we will be pushed aside by the big Corporations.. all that will be found on this double edged Internet is the watered down pop that has so flooded the market and true art Music & Otherwise will become as extinct as the dinosaurs. Artists such as myself need the support from those even slightly interested in Independent art, By listening, buying downloads when and if possible before art goes the way of the dodo.

Thanks to our artists, we pretend well, living under canopies of painted clouds and painted gods, in halls of marble floors across which the sung Masses paint hope in deep impatsi of echo. We make of the hollow world a fuller, messier, prettier place, but all our inventions can't create the one thing we require: to deserve any fond attention we might accidentally receive, to receive any fond attention we don't in the course of things deserve. We are never enough to ourselves because we can never be enough to another. Any one of us walks into any room and reminds its occupant that we are not the one they most want to see. We are never the one. We are never enough.

Notes

The set of beliefs ascribed to the Free Spirits is first to be found in a text called the Compilatio de novo spiritu put together by Albert the Great in the 1270s, concerning a group of persons investigated in the Swabian Ries area of Germany. The themes which occur in these documents, and which would emerge again in subsequent investigations, included:
Autotheism – in other words, a belief that the perfected soul and God are indistinguishably one. This was often expressed through the language of indistinction or annihilation. This belief would be heretical because it would undermine the necessary distinction between fallen created being and creator.
Denial of the necessity of Christ, the church and its sacraments for salvation – such that austerity and reliance on the Holy Spirit was believed to be sufficient for salvation. They believed that they could communicate directly with God and did not need the Catholic Church for intercession.
Use of the language of erotic union with Christ.
Antinomian statements ("Nothing is a sin except what is thought to be a sin"). Critics of the Free Spirit interpreted their beliefs to mean that they considered themselves to be incapable of sin and above the moral conduct of the Church. Verses such as Galatians 5.18 ("Those who are driven or led by the Spirit of God are no longer under the law") were seen as foundational to such beliefs.
Anticlerical sentiment.
During the late thirteenth century, such concerns increasingly became applied to the various unregulated religious groups such as beguines and beghards, who had greatly increased in number in the preceding decades. Concerns over such sentiments then began to occur elsewhere, especially during the 1300s, and especially in Italy. Partly motivated by such concerns, in 1308 Pope Clement V summoned a general council, which met at Vienne from October 1311 to May 1312. In particular, it had to engage with the report from the Paris inquisition (1308–1310) into the beguine Marguerite Porete’s The Mirror of Simple Souls (Porete’s writing, which had become well read through France, had been condemned in 1310 as heresy, and Porete had been burned at the stake) . It was the Council of Vienne which first associated these various beliefs with the idea of the 'Free Spirit'.

Fears over sets of beliefs similar to the Heresy of the Free Spirit have recurred at various points in Christian history. Fears over esotericism and antinomianism, such as were detected in the Heresy of the Free Spirit, may be detected in the early Church's response to Gnosticism. Fears of suspect forms of prayer were particularly apparent in reactions to the fourth and fifth century Messalianism.

What was perhaps novel in the fears of the Heresy of the Free Spirit was the fear of the notion of personal annihilation. This was a new idea to the mystical tradition, but was also seen as the root of many of the other dangers that were perceived in mystics in the late medieval period.

Similarities may also be detected with seventeenth-century quietism.